Read Online A Quiet Belief in Angels by R. J. Ellory - Free Book Online Page A

of all wisdom and truth. If Walter uttered it, well then it was gospel. A little of that carried through Hans to Elena, and I later felt it my duty to defend her against their pranks and pratfalls. One time, years before, Hans had told Elena she was to eat a worm. He said that Walter had given him the message, that it was a definite instruction from Walter that she eat a worm. A whole one. She didn’t ask questions, and had spent a good four or five minutes looking for one until Walter luckily appeared and happened to ask her what she was doing. Perhaps it was a Germanic thing, the view that one should always obey one’s elders. If anyone had told me that Walter instructed me to eat a worm, I would’ve told them to go stick that worm where the sun didn’t shine, and I wouldn’t have meant beneath the Kruger house.
    The heat didn’t continue for another three weeks, it continued until the latter part of September, and by then the Okefenokee was struggling to make it as far as the county line. We never did discover if the swamps dried out sufficiently to walk on. The equine encephalitis came and infected horses as far north as Winokur, as far south as St. George. Lines were drawn on maps, and those maps were handed out at town meetings right across the state. The lines were territorial divides, and people were forbidden from crossing those lines in case they carried the infection into new areas. Oddly enough, though we were neighbors, one line ran right between us and the Krugers. I could not visit with them until Christmas was on the horizon, but each week my mother would sent me to the end of the High Road, and there—wrapped in a cloth and tucked beneath the same rock—was a package left by Mr. Kruger. Countless times I went for that package, nothing more than a piece of leather rolled up and tied with a string, and each time I ferried it back to my mother without a question. Finally my curiosity took a hold and wouldn’t let go. I fetched the leather from beneath the stone, and knelt there in the dirt for a moment. I thought of what my father would think; whether he had worked hard enough to become an angel, and even then could see right down into my thoughts. The question in my mind was greater than the threat of censure, and I untied that string, remembering each turn so I could tie it once more when I’d looked inside.
    Seven dollars.
    A five and two one-dollar bills.
    It seemed strange to me that Gunther Kruger would send seven dollars to my mother each week.
    I tucked the bills back and rolled the leather around them, and then I ran home.
    I gave her the money and never said a word.
    For some reason I felt like Judas.
     
    December of 1941.
    In October we had heard that Adolf Hitler was near the gates of Moscow; that an American battleship—the USS Reuben James—had been attacked while on convoy duty west of Iceland. Seventy sailors died, forty-four were rescued. We held our breath, afraid to move perhaps. Reilly Hawkins said something bad would happen, that he’d been seized by a premonition while on an errand to White Oak.
    Reilly Hawkins’s premonition came true.
    On December seventh the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. Three hundred and sixty Japanese warplanes attacked the U.S. Pacific Fleet in Hawaii. They also attacked U.S. bases in the Philippines, on Guam and Wake. Twenty-four hundred people were killed.
    Four days later Hitler and Mussolini, the Fascist dictator of Italy, declared war on America.
    Within six weeks American troops would land in Northern Ireland. They were the first to set foot in Europe since the Expeditionary Forces landed in France during the Great War.
    Reilly Hawkins drove all the way to Fort Stewart, itself no more than a stone’s throw west of Savannah, but the Army told him his feet were flat and his arches were fallen and he couldn’t carry a gun for Roosevelt. I’d never seen a man so dejected and broken. He stayed in his house for three days straight, and when he